Monday, November 21, 2016

On
31st October, PLOS sent out a surprise tweet saying that its CEO
Elizabeth Marincola is leaving the organisation for a new job in Kenya. Perhaps
this is a good time to review the rise of PLOS, put some questions to the
publisher, and consider its future.

PLOS
started out in 2001 as an OA advocacy group. In 2003, however, it reinvented itself as an open access publisher and
began to launch OA journals like PLOS
Biology and PLOS Medicine. Its mission: “to accelerate progress in
science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.” Above
all, PLOS’ goal was to see all publicly-funded research made freely available
on the internet.

Like
all insurgent organisations, PLOS has over the years attracted both devoted
fans and staunch critics. The fans (notably advocates for open access) relished
the fact that PLOS had thrown down a gauntlet to legacy subscription publishers,
and helped start the OA revolution. The critics have always insisted that a bunch
of academics (PLOS’ founders) would never be
able to make a fist of a publishing business.

At
first, it seemed the critics might be right. One of the first scholarly publishers
to attempt to build a business on article-processing charges (APCs), PLOS gambled that
pay-to-publish would prove to be a viable business model. The critics demurred
and said that in any case the level that PLOS had set its prices ($1,500) would
prove woefully inadequate. Commenting to Nature
in 2003, cell biologist Ira Mellman of Yale University, and editor of The Journal of Cell Biology, said. “I feel that PLOS’s
estimate is low by four- to sixfold,”

In
2006, PLOS did increase the fees for its top two journals by 66% (to $2,500), and
since then the figure has risen to $2,900. While this is neither a four- or
sixfold increase, we must doubt that these prices would have been enough to
make an organisation with PLOS’ ambitions viable. In 2008 Naturecommented, “An analysis by Nature of the company’s accounts shows
that PLOS still relies heavily on charity funding, and falls far short of its
stated goal of quickly breaking even through its business model of charging
authors a fee to publish in its journals. In the past financial year, ending 30
September 2007, its $6.68-million spending outstripped its revenue of $2.86
million.”